


Dickbabs Week 2020

by theragingstorm



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Character of Color, Canon Disabled Character, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Light Angst, Mild Sexual Content, Multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:40:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theragingstorm/pseuds/theragingstorm
Summary: Seven prompts, one per day.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson
Comments: 34
Kudos: 77





	1. Day 1: History

**Author's Note:**

> Back once again! Going to do everything in my power to finish /this/, at least, on time, despite all my schoolwork and all my other works in progress...wish me luck.

Every night now, Dick Grayson slept curled around Barbara Gordon, and every night now, something about this felt familiar -- memories lingering in his mind that he couldn’t quite grasp. 

That might not have seemed strange on its own. For they had been together for over two years now, more than enough time for him to have countless memories of sleeping next to her, more than enough to have obtained the ring that now glittered on her finger. What was more, even before he had first kissed her, he had been falling asleep next to her on rooftops, in the backseat of the Batmobile, in separate sleeping bags on missions away. But there was more to it than that. 

There were more memories of Barbara in his head than there was time that he had spent with her. There was her older, her younger, her acting in ways he'd never expected or even seen. Her, and her with him, in a thousand different ways. 

Ways that he had never seen. That he had never even experienced. Events that had to have happened to completely different people, except that those people wore his and his fiancée's faces, or worse, events that seem to have had them apart. 

He’d mentioned it to Wally once over a couple beers and a Gotham Knights vs. Central City Cougars game, and Wally had surprised him by saying:

“Yeah, I get a similar thing with Linda. Sometimes when I’m with her I get this weird lingering sense of panic, like she’s not really there, like she’s gone and I’m looking for her. Or sometimes I look at her and there’s like, a memory of looking at a different woman the same way, a woman I've never even met.” Wally had paused to sip his beer. “I can ask around if you want, see if other people've experienced similar things.”

Dick wondered what it meant for a while. Wondered what it would mean to have nothing certain, to have everything at the whims of something greater than him, even a relationship with one of the most important people in the world to you. 

At the same time, more heroes’ accounts whispered around him.

_I remember, Ollie was killed in an explosion...or was it by Superman? No, Superman would never…_

_Sometimes I think that this is wrong, that I should be with Steve Trevor. Sometimes I think the world is going to war, and I have Mera’s lips on mine._

_Lois was murdered. I have it so clearly in my head. And yet, every morning I wake up next to her._

_I remember being a little girl and having Batman tower over me...but Batman and I are nearly the same age. I remember my father giving himself to Doctor Fate._

_Did I die? I can’t help but remember myself dying. But I never died._

_My lover died._

_My friend died._

_My friend turned evil._

_My parents died --_

_My parents lived --_

_Do I have a child? Did that child outlive me?_

_The Joker is a woman, the Joker is anonymous, the Joker’s name is Arthur, no, Jack, no, the Joker is my mother. I don’t have space in my head for all the memories from all these lives I can’t have possibly lived._

_Is the earth even still standing anymore?_

Dick lay next to Barbara and listened to her breathe. He _knew_ their past together as intimately as he knew his own heartbeat: had briefly met as children, met again as teenagers and became coworkers as Batgirl and Robin, became friends, briefly separated while he was with the Titans, fell in love, briefly fell apart, were now together again and about to be married. 

But as the blue that begat the morning sun began to peek above the horizon, the sky began to turn pink and gold, Dick still wondered.

Why did he remember little TVs and records and rotary phones like he was there when they were being used, why did Barbara’s face, followed by cheers for Congresswoman Gordon, seem so much older than his?

Why did he remember her younger than she was, bubbly and chirpy in purple as she held his hand and fell with him while he wore a spy uniform, remember her in a different gray Batgirl suit and in a hoodie close to tears as she begged him to work through his amnesia and accept that she was his friend? 

Why did he remember her marrying someone else? Why did he remember _him_ marrying someone else? Why did he remember a tall girl and a little boy that were not Barbara’s children?

Unable to sleep further, he left his fiancée at rest, stumbled naked out of their bed to the bathroom and switched on the shower. Gushes of hot water; steam filling the white-tiled room. 

Why did he remember their son, their daughter? Why did he remember her being gunned down in the street in front of their child, remember her sobbing alone when Bruce brought his dead body home and he could only helplessly watch as a spirit, remember break-up after break-up that couldn’t possibly have all been real?

Why did he remember her being Batman’s protégée first, remember being her classmate at school while he took pictures with some blond girl, remember her as Tim’s Batgirl instead of Jason’s, remember her growing old as the Commissioner?

Dick shut his eyes and let the sweet, fragrant scent of soap fill his senses, felt the warm water fall over his skin. 

Why did they seem to have twenty first times? One a rooftop, in her childhood bedroom, in his college dorm, on his nineteenth birthday, her crying as he caressed her bullet scar, her with working legs that she wrapped around his waist? 

Why was she already his beloved wife in some memories, why wasn’t she, in others, there at all? 

“The multiverse is pretty big, man,” Wally had said thoughtfully. “And pretty expansive. Maybe when we can’t reach the rest of it physically, parts of it leak into _our_ plane of existence.”

Were those memories real? Maybe not for this life, but could it be real for some other?

Those other Dicks, those other Barbaras...who were they? What were _their_ stories?

He wondered, for he could whisper _their_ history in his sleep; he knew it by heart. He wondered if all those other Dick Graysons could or would do the same. 

He toweled off and dressed, making his way to her kitchen, watching the sky turn the color of forget-me-not petals as the coffee brewed, filling the kitchen with its scent. He waited until the coffee was done, and he went to go wake her. 

Barbara was stirring just as he made his way to their room, just as he bent to kiss her forehead. Another memory came, unbidden, of him as an eighteen-year-old, confessing his love to her while she lay asleep on a couch. Then, a memory of her, a few years older, sleeping while curled around their newborn, her lips pressed to soft, curly baby hair. 

He wondered if that one was even from another universe, or if it was a portent of things to come. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” she murmured, lifting her head from her pillow. “Not like you to get up before me.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Got lost in thought.” He smoothed her hair back from her forehead, then backed away, letting her stretch, then reach for her chair. "Meet you for breakfast?

"Like you even have to ask."

He returned to the kitchen while she washed up, clouding his coffee with milk, making eggs and spreading raspberry jam on floury bread, turning as she emerged in her jeans and green tank top, three different Batgirls of three different ages flashing through his mind, different Oracles, Barbaras who were neither. But none of them were _this_ Barbara. None of them were part of _this_ story. 

They’d already had so many years together, bad times and good, but many more yet to come. For a moment, he wished that all the other Dick Graysons and Barbara Gordons across the multiverse would be able to be as happy as he was with her.

Then Barbara met his eyes, and, less guarded than he’d ever seen her, broke into an open smile as bright as the sky. 

Then all other memories other than his own, from _this_ life, flew from his head as he bent to embrace her. He breathed in the smell of lavender soap, mingling with the smells of breakfast, and they only pulled apart to sit down together at the kitchen island. As the sun rose higher, they didn’t start work yet, just sat there, having their breakfast, drinking their coffee. 

Together, in the pastel light of a new day.


	2. Day 2: Touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been sitting on this particular au for a while, and will likely expand on it later. What kingdom are the family rulers of, you ask? Well, in this case, I've gone the Disney route and decided that instead of a preexisting country, they rule a small but powerful European country that you conveniently can't find on a map. 
> 
> You can probably tell I had 19th-century period dramas on the brain when I wrote this.

It was exceedingly improper for ladies of any social standing to show physical affection in public. 

Barbara certainly hadn’t been particularly high up the social ladder before, just the general’s daughter, even if he  _ was _ the king’s favorite general, and before, whenever she’d so much as put a hand on a friend’s or her former fianc é ’s arm, she’d obtained a slew of delicate frowns from more well-bred, wealthier ladies. Duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, with manners too ingrained to so much as meet most men’s eyes, choosing to duck their heads or raise their feather fans instead. Barbara was, by their and their husbands’ standards, loud, rude, and imperious, the fiery-haired and fiery-tempered annoyance of a girl the court largely only tolerated because the king was friends with her father and she was, by extension, friends with his children. 

Now the gentry had to not just tolerate her, but exalt her -- at least to her face. It rather came with the territory of her marrying their kingdom’s beloved crown prince. 

She leaned into the cane-and-wooden back of her wheelchair, a few curling strands of hair falling from her neat updo around her face. The meeting table was crowded with old men with sideburns and outrageous mustaches, Bruce sitting at the head in his fur and black clothes, looking as haggard as he always did at these sorts of things. 

“And once again, this new tax plan you have, Your Majesty, is absolutely unacceptable --”

“Lord Chancellor, I assure you, it will work.”

“But Your Majesty --”

As crown princess, she had been forced to catch up annoyingly quickly with the dreary ongoings of politics. Usually, she listened attentively, even to the most dull of details, concerned with acquiring as much knowledge as possible and helping people, but now, the MPs and councilors were just going in circles, and Bruce was clearly desperate to get this closed up as quickly as possible. So she drew her nail along the pine-wood meeting table and looked across it to her husband. 

His hair was escaping its neat pushed-back style too, curling softly, looking almost as thick and tousled as it did when he was comfortable, away from the court. In his suit, adorned with medals, almost all of him was covered...except for his face and his hands. 

Noticing her stare, he blushed faintly, looking down at the table, hands flexing slightly. She fixated on this slight motion, watching the scarred knuckles tightening. 

She had fully expected to marry him. But she had never expected to fall in love with him.

Before, neither of them had had anyone seriously courting them in some time, which had been fine for her, but which was devastating for a crown prince, who needed security, tradition, and who  _ especially _ needed heirs of his own. It had been his father who had suggested a marriage of convenience, who had suggested one of his son’s oldest, dearest friends -- for if you were to marry for anything other than money or love, shouldn’t it be someone you already knew you could be partners with?

Her father had grudgingly accepted, on the grounds that she be treated with respect by the court and continue to be treated with warm friendship by her husband. She, for her part, had bristled a little at the idea of being traded away to appease the old men whining for the prince to marry -- because God and the whole kingdom knew his siblings probably wouldn’t anytime soon -- but saw the practicality of it long before Dick stopped protesting about the lack of romance about it. 

Though the rest of the court had continued to complain, behind their hands, where they thought she couldn’t hear, about the sharp-tongued, too well-educated, not wealthy enough, not well-bred enough, woman their prince had wedded. Wondering whether she could bear children, with her shredded back and the hole in her side. Snickering when her wheels caught on uneven stones or carpet rolls, smirking the chancellors and advisors told her to shut up and be demure like a proper princess should. 

Oh, but little did they know. The truth was, Dick needn’t have worried. For she should have known, should have known the instant they fell asleep in the same great bed on their wedding night, even five feet away from each other, how easy it would become to live with him, to be his wife. The three words lingered on her tongue constantly now, rising to her lips almost every time she looked at him. They both knew it. Though she _still_ dared not say them yet. 

The sun was going down by the time Barbara finally got fed up.

“It will not kill the gentry, including you, to pay slightly higher taxes so the rest of our country doesn’t have to keep sleeping in soot and gutters,” she snapped, startling the jabbering old men into silence. “You have more than enough money. Now shut up and take the bill to the rest of Parliament to be voted on so we can carry on with all the  _ other _ necessary matters of this country you’ve been keeping us from.”

Bruce publicly stayed stony-faced as the politicians spluttered, but she saw him hide a smirk behind his hand. 

Dick was  _ openly _ smiling as the meeting dissolved, as he got up and walked beside her through the grand hallways of the palace. She saw his arm extend slightly, hand moving closer to her on instinct, even though she kept her own on her wheels. 

“Thank you for cutting that off before we were there all night.”

She smirked, pausing briefly to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“You’re welcome. I am  _ always _ happy to yell at people for you. Now,” she continued brusquely, “we’re finally free, so do you want to take dinner with your family, or in our room?”

Dick shrugged, not taking his eyes off her.

“I’m happy either way. So what do you want to do?”

“Our room. I  _ refuse _ to engage any more men than I have to tonight, and I’m sorry, but that includes your father and brothers.”

Dick burst out laughing; her heart involuntarily swelled. Right then, after a long day of paperwork and meetings, she wanted more than anything to take him in her arms, but she kept her head high, her expression unrevealing of her true intentions. 

Several court ladies stared at him as they passed, glaring at Barbara for being able to make him laugh. Her face remained impassive, even as Dick chuckled. She thought at first that he hadn’t noticed.

“Fair enough. I’ll ring for it to be brought up.”

When they got to their quarters, the splendid, lavish bedroom they’d been sharing for a year and a half, painted in green and blue and gold with huge windows and alcoves, shelves lined with books and wardrobes overflowing with more clothes than she could’ve imagined, she exhaled hard, almost falling backwards in her chair, before starting to undo her hair. It was loose around her shoulders, wavy and snarled from the long day, before she realized that Dick’s eyes were still on her. 

She looked around, meeting his gaze. Her eyes flicked down to his hands again; they were strong, with slim fingers, and she noticed once again that they had tensed slightly, clearly barely resisting the urge to touch her. 

She extended the silver-backed hairbrush.

“Will you take care of my hair? It’s half a wreck.”

He said nothing at first, but moved at once to her side, accepting the brush. It ran through her hair so gently she barely noticed the tangles being undone, just the occasional gentle tug. One of his hands braced lightly against her bare shoulder; she shivered. 

“Barbara, sometimes I worry about how people here treat you, how they think of you,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. She started, taken aback. “I mean...court life comes with a lot of pressure and scrutiny, and my siblings and I were raised to cope with it, but you --”

“Are you saying I can’t handle it?” she asked, her own voice sharpening.

“I’d never say that.” The brush stilled. “What I  _ am _ saying is: whatever it might mean to other people, whatever marriage might mean to the court, you’re my wife, and to me, that means...I just want to know that you’re okay, and be here for you if you’re not.”

Dick’s hand not occupied by the brush stroked over her hair. 

Barbara sighed softly.

“Oh, damn you. You make it impossible to be angry, sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t like to risk my princess’s wrath.” Warmth crept back into his tone.

When she tried to turn to face him, she realized that his fingers had snagged in the tangles left in her hair. She winced as he tried to tug them free and failed.

“Sorry about that.”

“It’s alright.” She tried for a dry joke. “You’re just proving what people say, that their prince is shackled to me.”

A rather strange, intent look entered Dick’s eyes. He studied the red locks of hair ensnaring his fingers, then met her gaze again.

“Well. I happen to love these shackles.”

They stared at each other for a moment. 

Then she seized him by the front of his jacket and pulled him down to her lips. The hairbrush fell to the floor with a clatter. 

A day’s worth of tension snapped as he bent and encircled her waist with his arm, clutching her hair tighter as she kissed him, tasting his lips and seeing him out of the corner of her eye kneel between her legs. He scooped her up, carrying her, like she allowed no one else to do, soon _ lying _ between her legs as they were on their enormous bed, sinking under each other’s weight into the goosefeather pillows, the soft sheets, hands on each other as they kept kissing. 

“Sit up,” he managed to gasp out.

“Say please,” she purred, and he actually did, murmuring his pleas to her in a voice like supplication, and so she sat up in return, allowing his shaking hands to unlace the stays of her dress, then, when it fell down around her waist, those of her corset. She stripped away his shirt and jacket, his pants, and their hands interlocked at last, bracing together against the bed. He gave her one more lingering kiss, nudging her legs back. 

_ If only they could see their prince now, _ she thought, smiling to herself, then gasping and moaning aloud. 

They pulled the sheets up over themselves just before one of the maids came in with dinner, who politely averted her eyes and curtseyed (but also, unless Barbara’s eyes were deceiving her, actually threw her princess a conspiratorial, congratulatory grin before ducking out), finishing every bit of their food before settling back into the pillows. She opened a book and read, resting her head on his chest while he played with her hair again, stroking it like a living creature; she savored his touch, leaning her head against his warm skin. 

“Do people really talk about you like you’re shackling me?”

“Not where they think I can hear.” 

Dick made an uncomfortable noise in his throat; she closed her book and looked up. One of her hands found the line of his jaw, stroking along it. 

“Hey. I don’t care. Fuck them as far as I’m concerned.”

“I get that, but I still don’t like that they…”

“Yes. I know you don’t.” Still looking at him, she set her book on the nightstand. “And it... _ is _ very touching how much you care about me when you don't have to do that.”

“Of course I do.”

It was also touching the way he said it, like it was a given, without hesitation. She turned, so that she could cup his face with both hands.

“But I know what I signed up for when I became a princess. When I became your wife.” Her thumbs ran over her skin. “And for me...it...oh God damn it. Fuck. For me, you -- it -- is worth it.”

She didn’t know why she was surprised by him kissing her again, feeling his arms back around her waist. She leaned into the kiss, reaching up to embrace around her husband’s back with one hand, and, after some minutes, pushing her thighs back open with the other.

Some time later, he lay asleep beside her. Barbara knew she should sleep too, for tomorrow was another day of paperwork, of meetings, of enduring court culture, of the minutiae of running a kingdom. But for a while, at least, she ran her hand over her husband’s shoulder, caressing, watching him melt into their bed, snuffling quietly in his sleep. 

“‘Whatever marriage might mean,’” she echoed him from earlier. Then she sighed, leaning in to give him one last kiss. “I love you. I really do. Someday...I won’t just be brave enough to lead our people, but to say it to your face.”

It was only after that that she was able to close her eyes too. Throughout the palace, all the gas lamps were turned off and the candles blown out, enveloping everyone within in the dark, soft embrace of the night. 


	3. Day 3: Scars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this chapter's somewhat heavier than the others...which you might expect from a WWII au. It definitely touches on some potentially triggering topics, so feel free to skip today if it makes you uncomfortable. 
> 
> Also, the spelling of Barbara's surname was taken from DC Bombshells (which is also an au in which she's a Frenchwoman during WWII! Among other things).

_October 1944_

Autumn had fallen over the French countryside, and as Dick watched the glowing lights of the little town in the distance, not far from the Belgian border, huddling over their little makeshift campfire that they’d had to hide within a cluster of trees, he considered whether if he had to do it all over again, he’d choose differently.

“Are you just going to sit there staring into the distance all night,” said the woman at his side, as she took her turn to turn the rabbit they'd caught earlier over the fire, “or are you going to have your dinner? We worked on it all afternoon and I'm not eating this whole thing myself."

“Well, in _that_ case I shall, Miss Gourdon.”

She smiled faintly as she slid the rabbit off the spit, then taking his standard-issue knife and splitting it apart. 

His getaway car had been shot off the side of the road in the German-occupied French countryside, just ten kilometers from Lille. So it had been Barbara Gourdon’s branch of the French Resistance -- simply _La Résistance_ , they called it -- to pull him from the wreckage before the Nazis could, and, so they claimed, in light of her own injury a year prior, she was the natural choice to be in charge of _his_ recovery.

“Just because I’m a woman,” he’d caught the beautiful redhead in his branch of the infirmary grumbling in her native tongue, assuming he wouldn’t understand, “they expect me to play the sweet little nursemaid to some doe-eyed Englishman who was too stupid to drive a damn car.”

“ _Mademoiselle_ , you could not play the sweet little nursemaid to anyone even if there were a gun to your head,” he’d replied in perfect French, and they’d been friends ever since. And ever since, each of her smiles and each of her barbed comments made his heart flutter in his chest.

Her superiors, at the same time, had been thrilled to find that they had rescued a Allied spy, gathering information from the Germans in Paris, Amiens, and finally Lille, to be eventually relayed back to the British high command. 

Information on the Germans’ movements. Hitler’s plans to leave Prussia, the plans to attempt to take Bastogne, to retake Antwerp. For months, Dick had posed as their driver, their waiter, their valet, and with his lighter brown skin and blue eyes, passing for Mediterranean, they didn’t look twice at him. He had taken their money and their information and swallowed back bile more times than he could count as he listened to them, for they knew he spoke French, didn’t know he spoke German, gleefully recount their movements against England, Russia, and the United States…

Worse than that. As he listened to them gleefully recount the numbers at the camps. 

He dared not risk being there any longer before he stole one of Der Kapitän’s cars. 

The Resistance listened attentively to his stories, and conveyed without him, without Barbara, even though he’d been talking with her regularly throughout his recovery. 

_To take back France from the hands of the Nazis,_ he’d heard them murmur around him. _We must get this boy and the plans he has obtained back to the British. They are all throughout France now. Normandy. Provence. Marseille. Dijon. Calais. And they are coming back to Dunkirk._

It was decided that he would be escorted to the relatively nearby Dunkirk, to the Allies’ siege. Many strong men offered to be his escort, to ensure that he would be safe, but it was Barbara Gourdon who stood up with fire in her eyes. 

_You? A woman? And a crippled woman, at that? Mademoiselle, please..._

“I am smarter than any man in this room, and far better at going about undetected,” she’d declared. “As for my being crippled, well, who in this war isn’t, in some way, at this point? I am no less than a fighter or a person because of it.”

His heart had warmed in his chest at her courage, at her words, that day. Something within him stirred further. Something that refused to lie back down again. 

He gazed at her as they shared their rabbit and some of the rations the Resistance had provided them with. They’d sold their also-provided cigarettes a few towns back, and bought wine instead, for she was a practical woman, but still very French.

“Trust me. And don't argue. You English don’t know or appreciate wine,” she’d said, and he’d laughed, for it was true. 

The distance between Lille and Dunkirk was less than seventy kilometers, but they were traveling on foot, ducking and dodging the uniformed Nazis and anyone who so much as looked askance at Barbara’s cane, the way she hobbled, or at Dick, the purported Mediterranean. 

She stretched out her legs as she finished her dinner and buried the rabbit bones, resting her cane aside, wincing in obvious pain. 

“Do you need anything?” Dick asked. “I could help you put your feet up.”

She clutched her calves; her legs with the buckled knees, the twisted ankles, hidden under her dress. 

“If any other man offered to touch anywhere near my skirts, he’d get my cane across the face,” she remarked, and he smiled nervously. “But you’re not any other man, so…” Barbara sighed. “Just don’t tell anyone. My superiors think I’m weak enough as it is; they think you’re going to die, in my supervision.”

Dick, careful not to hike up her skirts, propped her feet up a bit on a log; she leaned against the willow to her back, sighing a little more. She shifted, and he saw the marks on her calves, the way her ankles buckled, the way her knees didn’t turn in properly...her scars, the endless swirls of puckered, pinkish marks against her pale skin.

He looked away from her legs out of politeness, trying to preserve her modesty, but judging by the way her mouth tightened, she must’ve thought he was repulsed.

“Do you ever get scared, Dick?” she asked before he could defend himself. She picked up the wine bottle and sipped from it, glancing away from him towards the town’s lights. 

She spoke perfect English. He spoke perfect French. It was hard to tell whose language was flowing from whose lips these days. 

Dick rested his arms on his knees and contemplated the low flames. Gold, red, the hint of blue in the center, the wood within blackening and falling apart. 

“Of course I get scared,” he replied. “You know who I am.”

“An English spy. A _Roma_ English spy.”

“A Roma English spy who was raised by a Jew.” He blinked slowly. “The Nazis wouldn’t grant me a merciful death if they caught me. They’d put me on the next train to Auschwitz. I know that.”

She silently passed him the wine bottle; he drank carefully. The slightly sour taste lingered on his tongue.

“It’s hard to believe you’re not petrified with fear every day, then,” she said softly.

“I practically am,” he confessed. With his fellow Allies, writing home to his family, he always needed to put on a brave face. But not here. “But...the need to stop this war, all this suffering, all the Axis powers have done, it’s so much more important than my individual safety, Barbara. You have to know that.”

“I do.” She still wouldn’t face him. “You’re almost too good to be true, Dick Grayson.”

He was taken completely aback. _Him?_ She thought so highly of _him?_

Then she turned her head slightly and he saw that she was holding back tears.

“Barbara, you don’t have to be brave for me. I already know you’re brave. You're the furthest thing from weak I've ever known.”

They finally faced each other. He remembered all the stories, the awed accounts of how she’d walked calmly into the line of fire to shoot and bayonet Nazis, of how she’d climbed into enemy cars to steal food and money from under their noses, the German grenade that had ripped open her legs when she’d been a former runner and gymnast and how she’d kept fighting anyway, how she’d escorted Jewish and Romani families from individual hideaways to the Resistance hideout, so that they might make their way to the Allies. Ever since Hitler had taken her country, she had started fighting, and had never stopped. 

He thought of what soldiers did to women in wartime, how the Nazis put political dissenters and mentally and physically disabled people in their camps too. His blood boiled at the idea, but again, his heart thrummed thinking of her courage. 

“Roll up your sleeves,” she commanded quietly.

He did without question, the white fabric leaving to expose his arms. Bullet wounds. Shrapnel. The still-healing remains of the car wreck. All bearing stories of bloodshed. All marred his skin, the marks on his body silent evidence of the horrors of war. 

Her fingers traced over each of his scars, gentle, unflinching, and he knew that she understood he was not repulsed by her. Then she lifted the hem of her skirts to her knees, exposing her own scars to the golden firelight. 

Dick dared not touch her knees, or above -- _though how he longed to sometimes, now_ \-- but he traced the twisted marks on her legs with everything he felt in his chest, as softly as if he were touching a newborn. She shuddered, and he saw that she was letting herself cry. 

He then reached upwards, fingers brushing against soft red pin-curls. The feeling of her scars still lingered; they had been imprinted on the palms of his hands. 

_“Puis...puis-je vous embrasser?”_

“Yes. Yes you may.”

For a moment, under the velvet blue of the October night, though they did not forget who they were fighting for, they _did_ forget, by the dying glow of the firelight, to guard themselves, even after all they had seen. 

Two days after that, she turned her back as he drifted out of the harbor on a ship returning to England from the Dunkirk siege, and even if they won the war, and _certainly_ if they lost, he might never see her again. 

But seven months after _that,_ some time after he was honorably discharged and mere days after Germany offered up its last surrender, Dick Grayson boarded the next flight out of London -- to France, once again.


	4. Day 4: Promise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Angela Carter and Hozier for being sources of inspiration for this chapter. And with thanks to Marjorie Liu's "Black Widow: The Name of the Rose," for directly providing me with the idea of a ribbon in lieu of a ring.

They had told her she would never survive the forest. 

Her father had been appointed sheriff of a small town in the Montana Territory, deep in the Rockies, away from the city of Helena, where they had originally stayed when they moved out west. Almost as soon as they arrived, the townsfolk whispered; said it wasn’t right for a woman of her age to still live with her father, that she should move out and get married. 

_ If _ she could find anyone that could overlook her personality. Her ferocity. The fact of her legs. 

So Barbara moved out of her father’s house. But not into any local man’s home. She built her own, and she built it outside of town, in a clearing surrounded by pines, just underneath the shadows of the mountains. 

Now, she and her father still visited each other fairly frequently. But aside from her horses and her cat, as far as the townsfolk knew, there was not another creature that lived with her. Especially not, they thought, a man. 

So they were stunned by the fact that, two years later, she was yet alive. And some people wondered around the red ribbon that was tied around her left finger in lieu of a wedding ring, but more were just insistent that her luck was running out.

_ I promise you. Any day now, she just won’t come back. She’ll die without a man to protect her,  _ she heard them whisper as she rode into town on market days.  _ The beasts will tear her apart. The bears. The cougars. The wolves. The wolves will devour a lone woman like that. _

Barbara bought new bullets for her rifle and ignored them. 

A frozen wind blew threw her stretch of the mountains, clouds gathering in the distance, when she went to give the horses their dinner. Leaning heavily on her cane, she strew hay into their troughs, both that of the bay draft horse, who helped her with her chores, and the small, lean chestnut, whom she hunted with. Her long-furred black cat wound around her ankles, looking content from feasting on the mice and birds that had tried hiding from the cold in her stables. 

“Sun’s about to go down,” she murmured, resting her hand on the neck of the bay. She looked over at his compatriot. “Good time to head into the forest, you think, Achilles?”

The small chestnut tossed his mane and neighed. 

“Good boy.” She addressed the cat. “You watch Patroclus while we’re out.”

The cat climbed into the bay’s stall and curled up on the straw as she brought out the saddle and reins. 

The dark, looming trees of the forest seemed to swallow her, the taller mountains looming like jagged teeth, as she nudged her horse past their little clearing. The cold needled her face, sweeping through her hair; she pulled her furs tighter around her with the hand that was not on the reins, the hand that had the red ribbon on it. Her rifle and cane clattered slightly against her back.

The shadows grew long as the sun began to creep downwards. Small shapes flickered in the trees. But she feared no beast. No bear, no cougar. 

Snowflakes began to drift from the sky; her breath came out like smoke. 

In the distance, she heard a piercing howl.

She heard the howls that answered it. 

And Barbara smiled to herself. 

The sun had fallen by the time the first whitetail stag fell to her bullet, soon accompanied by a pair of wild turkeys, a handful of small birds, and an enormous elk. The howls grew closer, and she slid from her horse’s back, tethering him to a tree, leaning on her cane again as she tied the fowl to his saddle, strapped the smaller deer over his back. The elk, however, she left on the forest floor, and she waited. 

As night fell, the first great black shape appeared through the trees, the patriarch of the pack, his narrowed eyes glowing as blue as ice. The shadowy, smaller dark silhouettes appeared around him; at first she only counted six and for a moment she worried. 

But then she heard branches snapping behind her, and she turned. 

The wolf before her was as big as her horse, and not even close to being the biggest of the pack. Clouds of steam came as he breathed, heavy with exertion, pointed ears pricked forward, his fur, as glossy and black as volcanic rock, so thick she could bury her arms in it up to her elbows. His eyes were a different shade of blue than the patriarch’s, a softer blue, but his red mouth was open as he panted, his teeth shining and white, long as knives. 

She threw her arms around his neck and embraced him. He made a soft noise of content, dipping his head, nuzzling her back as best he could. 

The rest of the pack behind her made wolflike, excited chuffing noises as they moved forward. The horse shuddered, backing away as best he could, still not used to this. 

In her arms, for the full moon was finally over that night, the fur became skin, the size of him shrank, and the great wolf melded back into a man. But his hair was still as thick and black as his fur, fell down nearly to the small of his back, and his eyes were the same color blue. His rough hands cupped her face, rubbing his thumbs over her cheeks, as his family turned back into humans as well. 

“Typical Dick,” one of his brothers huffed, “falls back into her arms the second the full moon’s up.”

“Sometimes even before that,” another one sniggered. Whispers arose, and teasing snickers.

But she turned her glare on the other boys, and their commentary and laughter dried up. 

“Don’t make me slap you, Jason.”

Most of the month, their shapeshifting was voluntary. Not so during the full moon, they remained wolves through its height, their animal instincts almost overtaking their human minds. Terrible stories followed them wherever they went, the monster wolves, big enough to devour humans, the great black beasts that prowled through the frozen pines every month. 

“Also, it would be nice,” she sighed, “if your transformations allowed you to be  _ clothed _ when you turned back human.”

“How do you think  _ we _ feel,” one of the other boys agreed, awkwardly covering his crotch with a pine branch while their sister snuck around poking people in the bare ribs, making them jump and yelp; she was clearly happy about having fingers again. Their father rolled his eyes, which made their father’s mate chuckle, her green eyes glowing as she leaned into his side. 

“Settle yourselves,” the patriarch grumbled. “You’re embarrassing us in front of your brother’s mate.”

“I’ve seen far worse from you all, Bruce.”

Chuffing laughter arose from the youngsters, and Barbara smirked, holding Dick a little closer. He still smelled like earth and evergreen, and the falling snowflakes stood out like points of starlight on his hair. 

“It’s good to see you again,” he said to her while his siblings continued teasing and tussling with each other. "I...I'm sorry I made you wait. Again."

“You say that every month.” She rested her head on his shoulder. How the townsfolk would gasp to see her with a rifle, as much as they would to see her holding a naked man. Even as a human, his nails were still long and rough, his canine teeth still sharper than a normal man’s, and his blue eyes had a slight glint to them. But he was warm to the touch even in the bitter wind, and she was not afraid of him. She had never been afraid of him. "I don't mind waiting, you know that."

“I mean it every month.” One rough hand caressed over her unbound hair, over the furs she wore. “But I still hate to make you...and, wow. You look beautiful.”

“Oh, go on. I haven’t bathed today, you absurd man,” she returned, but she let him keep holding her. She breathed deep, the two of them surrounded by clouds like dragon breath. The sky smelled like snow, the pines rose around them like walls, and the darkened forest seemed oddly silent aside from the yelps of the youngsters; all the animals of the forest must’ve fled before the long shadows of the wolf pack. All seemed cast either in the faint silver rays of moonlight and the bone-white points of the new snow, or the velvety charcoal blackness that the night was casting; the only color now seemed to be the reds of Barbara’s hair and the ribbon around her finger. 

“And  _ I _ haven’t, except in streams, since the moon changed, and yet…” He teasingly twirled a strand of her hair around his finger. “ _ You _ still like  _ me,  _ I can hope. Even after all this time.”

“God, you’re incorrigible.”

Minutes passed, and though she loved his family, his pack, she really wanted to have him to herself again. Seeming to sense this, he kissed her forehead, soft with affection, and cleared his throat, gesturing to his family. 

His father nodded slightly, then let out a sharp noise in his throat, making his children, his cubs, freeze in place. 

“Home?” the sister guessed.

“We’ve barely gotten to say hello,” one of the brothers complained.

“I’ll visit later,” Barbara promised, and she would. Their home in the forest, perched above the town on the mountainside, was bigger than hers, big enough for the whole family and more. It was always worth the ride up the jagged slopes. 

They nodded to her, and their father, his expression wishing them luck, picked up the neck of the elk, her gift to them, in his jaws. 

She watched, still holding Dick in her arms, as the rest of them turned back into wolves and melted back into the forest, their guttural barks and yelps fading away with each beat of their heavy paws.

“Home,” Dick murmured, kissing her face again. His teeth glinted faintly. 

She managed to clamber back onto her horse, refusing any help, and the woods blurred into a black-and-white painting, wiped over by the artist's hand, as they ran through the oncoming wind and snow. For he was her side as a wolf again, and they raced each other, both grinning, baring their white teeth to the biting cold as they ran together, her hair streaming behind her like a banner.

She penned the animals back up in the stables upon arriving home, making sure they were warm for the night before double-bolting the door and putting away her quarry.

It was only when she had finally bathed, the white wind now swirling outside her windows like spirits on All Hallows, did she retreat to her bedroom -- and laugh.

A fire had been built up in the hearth, filling the room with raw warmth, and sprawled over her bed on his back, his paws in the air, was the great black wolf. Upon seeing her again, leaning heavily on her cane like an old woman when she wasn’t even thirty, his huge, tufted tail began wagging violently, nearly upturning her bookshelf and knocking over an unlit lamp. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said fondly, moving to sit on the bed next to him. “I missed you too.”

He was no different no matter what he looked like. It was part of why it was so easy for him to see her for herself, no matter how her body had been injured. It was part of why she loved him so much. 

He rolled over a bit and turned into a man, opening his arms, and she, so on guard with the rest of the world, went back into them. 

For a long time, they just savored each others’ company, talking together in low voices, then simply silent, listening to the fire’s snaps and whistles and the wind’s moans. 

After a while, he gravitated to the red ribbon on her finger.

“I wish I could get you a proper ring,” he said, tracing his own hand over Barbara’s.

“It’s not like I’m  _ missing _ a proper ring,” she replied practically. “Besides, you can’t exactly waltz into downtown and buy one, at least not yet. They’re still gun-shy around strangers. And _you'd_ be the strangest thing they ever saw.”

Dick bit his lip, and Barbara felt guilty. The romance of it clearly mattered to him, despite who they were, despite the unconventionality of their relationship. He still felt the need to prove his being worthy of her love; didn’t feel that he already had was, even though she _knew_ he was.

“But…” She laced their fingers together, the ribbon right against his skin, “Dick...you can call it a promise. That even if you can’t buy a ring, even if they won’t let you or try to chase you out --”

“-- I still love you,” he swore.

She kissed him with all her love and the ferocity of a wolf.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I know. I’ve always known. And I --” It was still hard to say, but she said it anyway, for it was worth it to her with him, “-- I love you too.”

A promise of her own.

In the town, people were locking their doors and shuttering their windows, shuddering at the distant animal calls and building up their own fires in an attempt to conquer the cold while Barbara Gordon feared neither, and the man in her arms did not fear her. 

“What an amazing woman I get to love,” he murmured, his long hair mingling on the pillows with her own. “I’m so lucky.”

“ _ I’m _ the lucky one,” she managed to say. “ _ Yes, _ before you say a word. Fur and all.”

He nuzzled her, and with the crackling of the fire and the warmth, and her companion back by her side, she was finally close to sleep. 

“Barbara?”

“Hm?”

“I was wondering. Would you call our future children cubs or puppies?”

She swatted him with the pillow, and he laughed. 

The wind outside howled, and it sounded like the song of wolves. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please know that wolves, while I do not recommend going out into the wilderness and cuddling them in real life, *are* primarily very social animals; their packs, the source of their strength and hunting ability, are literally family units (and not always biological family either). Very appropriate for the Batfamily to transition to.


	5. Day 5: Please

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, like an idiot, I mixed up the day 4 and day 5 prompts. Apologies. And further apologies for this being late; I promise I'll have day 6 up on time, no later than today. It's the least I can do.

Sometimes, their life was, to put it lightly, _a lot_. 

They had just gotten off a long, exhausting series of meetings and a red-eye from Mumbai, during which neither of them had slept at all because there had not been one, not two, but  _ three _ babies in their vicinity.  _ Then _ the plane had arrived at their connection in Istanbul over an hour late. So then they’d had to make a mad dash through the airport, take the wrong turn to their gate, almost lose their boarding passes, argue for nearly twenty minutes with the flight attendants about taking out someone’s bags so she could put her wheelchair away, and suffer through two more hours of severe turbulence. Then to spend half an hour finding a cab, to argue about storing her wheelchair  _ again _ , and finally, to have to pay the taxi driver well above the going rate just to get to their hotel before the reservation was no longer viable. When they’d actually  _ arrived _ at the hotel, they’d both barely had the energy to clean up before collapsing into bed. 

After all that, he was awoken by a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. 

“Barbara…” he groaned, burying his face in the pillow. “Not now. Five more minutes.”

“Dick, you’ve been asleep for almost seventeen hours. It’s five a.m.”

“Oh. Oh shit, really?” He rolled over, groaning and slapping his hand over his eyes. “And you have your first meeting with the Hungarian investors at nine...fuck, we should get going.”

“Yeah, but that’s not why I woke you up.”

He blinked his eyes open blearily, gazing upwards. 

She’d clearly been awake for a while now. Her clean, soft hair was twisted up, and she was already dressed in a crisp white blouse and one of the richly blue pantsuits that had miraculously managed to stay unwrinkled in her suitcase, contrasting with her hair. Her heels weren't on yet, but her glasses were perched neatly on the bridge of her nose, green eyes considering him over the rims, and his heart lifted in his chest upon seeing her, even after all that time. 

“Why did you, then?”

“Just didn’t want you to be in a rush, like we’ve been for the last month. Like, well, we always are.” She fiddled with a strand of her hair. “When we’re not traveling, I’m at home working.”

“And then someone overseas wants to give you a new accolade.” Even partly asleep, he couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice at saying so.

“Well,  _ that  _ I like. But honestly, this never does end.”

Some had accused Bruce of nepotism when he made her his head of software development and cyber security at Wayne Enterprises. Those some had been swiftly shut up by WE’s lightning-quick rise to the top of worldwide technology development under her leadership and expertise. Many companies courted her for patents and many CEOs bought her technology. Some even attempted to buy her branch -- and later, her. She had endured  _ many _ brunches with Lex Luthor and his bald head and his offers to give her a bigger salary and a private jet. 

“The only thing that tempted me was the private jet,” she had told Dick on the flight from Mumbai while some spoiled rich kids kept kicking the backs of their seats. First class did  _ not _ grant you full immunity from the miseries of flying. 

“Barbara, don’t feel bad on my account. First of all, we’re in a five-star hotel overlooking the Danube River in the middle of summertime, and I grew up in a circus trailer. Second of all, you love this job. This is your dream. You shouldn’t feel guilty about that just because of me.”

His wife shook her head, sighing softly.

“God, you’re sweet,” she mumbled. Then: “Of course I love my job. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. I just want  _ you _ to be okay too.” Her eyes flashed. “I want all parts of my life to be in good shape.”

Dick said nothing at first as he climbed out of the huge, soft bed, kicking away the white sheets and getting to his feet. Then he bent and kissed her; he must have tasted terrible, but she kissed him back anyway, throwing her arms over his shoulders.

“I  _ am _ okay.” And he was. For as she’d said it, the misery of the last couple days had finally begun to melt away. “I just...I love to travel.” 

Their week in India had been full of unimaginable color. The colors in the women’s clothes, the colors in the spices, the colors in the flowers, even the colors in the graffiti upon skyscrapers and tiny houses alike. Reds and saffrons and greens so deep they looked unreal. They had eaten food so spicy it had brought tears to his eyes, and when the restaurant manager had found out that Dick was Romani, his ancestors from the north of that very country, she’d said to him in Hindi,  _ “Welcome home.” _

Before that had been Egypt, everything bathed in the shimmering desert sun. Before that had been Japan, before that had been Mexico. And even in the unceasing work, he’d seen his wife’s unmistakable pride, the unmistakable joy and satisfaction she took in it all. 

“I love seeing all the places this takes us. And I love how much happiness developing this technology, and driving this company forward, gives  _ you _ .”

Her eyes crinkled with warmth, and she kissed him again for that.

“Alright. Let’s say I believe you.” She stroked a hand over his hair, her wedding ring brushing the skin of his neck, then pulled slightly apart. “You go shower and get dressed. But before we leave, there’s something I want to do.”

“Babs, I thought we couldn’t be late. And I thought you had all that paperwork to catch up on between now and then on top of that --”

“Dick.” He was stopped in his tracks by her voice. She looked at him intently, her tone soft, but firm. “Please.”

He exhaled hard, then looked at her, rolling his eyes a bit.

“I can never win with you.”

“No, you can’t.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Now go.”

After he had showered and dressed in a suit of his own, she began to lead him through the hotel. All was totally silent in the hours of early morning, even the housekeeping staff were absent; they were the only ones stirring through the faint light. 

“Where are we going?”

“Well, you see, I was here last year on my own, when I was pitching one of my designs to that Austrian company. Remember that?”

He nodded. 

“And I woke up before dawn then, too. So I wandered around upstairs, looking for  _ any _ possible source of coffee, and...I found the best place to be, when the sun came up.”

She pushed a door open, and Dick blinked as they stepped out onto a terrace, his mouth falling open. 

Over the river and its bridges, the pointed turrets of the Budapest Parliament, and the hills on the other side of the city, the sky was all gold. The very top of it was a pale shade of pink, but blending into the pink were brushstrokes of vivid yellow and orange, bathing the entire city in light, in warmth. Everything was illuminated; the river shone like it had been set alight. 

He vaguely heard Barbara murmur something about how they would start serving breakfast and coffee up here soon, and he thought about how much she loved sunrises, how much they meant to her, how she had taken comfort from them after she had been paralyzed. He thought about her sharing something that mattered that much to her with him.

He sat down next to her and put his arm around her, holding her as close as he possibly could.

“I love you so much.”

Barbara made a soft noise in her throat, shutting her eyes. And she held him back, and for a long time, they simply sat there. After the last few days of being in a constant hurry, after all that work, they simply sat there and watched the sun come up. 

It was only when the sky had turned from gold to blue that Barbara pulled slightly away, opening her purse and bringing out her laptop. Dick let her, just kept his hand on her shoulder.

“Want me to call home while you work?”

“Sure, it’s not even midnight in Gotham.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Bruce and your siblings are most definitely up...but our kids had better  _ not _ be this time, or I’m going to have words with the so-called ‘adults.’”

Laughing, Dick got out his phone, soon surrounding the pair of them with the voices of the rest of their family. Soon they would have to leave, to get back to work, and though he had accepted this, for now they were together on an early, bright summer morning in Budapest. A soft, cool wind rolled off the Danube, the sun rose higher, and in that moment, they were both completely at peace.


	6. Day 6: Whisper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one also turned out a little different and darker in tone. Potential triggers abound. And for this one, I'd like to thank my loved ones who are vampire fans, and for my having binged the entire new season of Castlevania in less than a day.

For decades, they said, over and over, that Gotham City was being stalked by a monster. 

Barbara knew full well that they were right. 

She had been born in 1967, what felt like so long ago now, even though she knew it would pale in comparison to the long life ahead of her. What had happened to her had happened in 1988, when she was only twenty-one years old. So she would look twenty-one, be physically twenty-one, for decades more. Centuries, if she was clever and lucky enough. Maybe even eternity, if such a thing existed. 

But now, in the present, it was night in Gotham City, and she was on the hunt. 

Perched on the roof of Martha Wayne Memorial Hospital, clad in all black to blend into the city shadows, her bright hair even covered with a black scarf, she smelled, and she listened. Millions of heartbeats pulsed around her, millions of slightly different scents of different people with different blood. Barbara was searching for one in particular, had been for decades, but he did not, like he never was, seem to be within close enough range to hear or smell. 

Scoffing in disgust, she made to leap from the roof, to fly off --

\-- but movement near the hospital doors caught her eye. A familiar heartbeat rose up to greet her ear; she looked, and sure enough, she spotted the blue scrubs-clad figure near the glass doors, leaving for the night. Seeing him did not surprise her, she had been getting to know his schedule more. They had been running into each other a lot lately...

If her own heart had still beat, it would have beat faster. 

She did indeed leap, falling straight down, landing a few paces behind him as silently as a cat. Her scarf blew off her head, exposing her long red hair, and the movement made him turn around -- his eyes growing wide. 

“Hi, Dick.”

“Barbara. Hi.”

Now that his surprise was gone, he smiled. She heard his heartbeat increase in tempo, sensed the blood rising to his cheeks. But f ortunately, by now it was easy for her to control her irrational need for blood, now it was only difficult when the person in question was openly bleeding, and only  dire when that _and_ that she was already hungry were both the case -- but neither of those applied to this situation. 

“It’s good to see you again,” he said warmly. She found herself walking with him, so close to one another, as they had often been during their meetings of late. “How have you been? How’s your book coming along?”

“Haven’t been able to work on it as much, I’ve been busy. But otherwise things are good. What about you? Remind me again how long until your residency’s up…”

“Two more years,” he confirmed. His hand brushed hers; she had to resist the urge to jerk it away. For some reason, she was ashamed of him feeling how cold her skin was, as cold as death, especially since his was so warm. “And then...well, I’ll still be  _ Mr. _ Grayson, never a doctor. But at least I’ll have a Nurse Grayson name tag; that's professional, right?”

She couldn't help but smile. Then shuddered faintly. 

God, he was only twenty-five, young and bright-eyed and full of life. Still so sweet and friendly; he was training to be a nurse, all he wanted was to help people. And she was a dead woman who spent her nights hunting down people like her murderer, trying to protect those still alive. 

“Are you cold? Do you need my jacket?”

“No, it doesn’t bother me.” She leaned a bit into his side to stave off his worries, and she hated saying goodbye to him even an hour later; they had both deliberately taken the long way home. 

Months passed; she continued to make sure that those young women and girls, like she had been, were safe in their beds when she dragged their rapists, abusers, and molesters out into the nearest alley and ripped out their throats. She found brutal cops, she found abusive pimps and drug dealers who kept people trapped in crushing debt, she found crime lords and white supremacists. Like she had been doing for the last thirty-plus years. She took no innocents’ lives to slake her thirst, and she never had to, for even with her added protection, there was still no shortage of people in Gotham who did evil things.

She had never caught the vampire who had done this to her, who had killed her and brutalized her and turned her into another monster. For all she knew, he had done it to more people afterwards; there was surely a very long list of people he had killed, and any one of them could’ve been like her, left with just enough blood in them to resuscitate, and how many of those new vampires would be like her, and how many would be like him. She wondered how many innocents’ lives he had destroyed, both directly and indirectly. 

(She was always very careful to drain every last drop of blood from the people she ate.)

As those months went by, she also found herself interacting more and more with humans outside her protection and her feedings. She had a friend who sang in her favorite nightclub, had another friend who was the teacher of those children she’d been keeping safe, checked up on two particular teenage girls whose horrible fathers she’d sent to an early grave. And of course, she kept seeing Dick Grayson. 

He didn’t get off his shifts at the hospital until after the sun went down, which was good for both of them -- he claimed that everyone in his family had always thrived best at night anyway. So she kept meeting him for coffee, for drinks, for museums and art galleries that were open unusually late, and she found herself enjoying his company more and more, until she could fully remember what it had been like to have a racing heart. He often took her hand as they walked home, and she kept forgetting to pull it out of his grip. 

Forgetting that she couldn’t hide forever. That he would run away in terror as soon as he found out what she really was. 

She grew even more familiar with his heartbeat, and with each day, watching him stop to talk to random strangers on the street, drop twenties into people's buckets and guitar cases, joke with children, watched the way he threw his whole body into a laugh when he was happy, she made a promise to herself: that she would never, ever hurt him. He was the last person in Gotham who deserved it.

Night kept coming, shadows falling over the city like velvet, each neon light like a beacon. He still saw her as nothing stranger than an insomniac with sensitive skin, and he still smiled every time they met again. He told her stories about his siblings and friends, and she was enthralled with each one; she recommended him all her favorite books from the eighties and nineties, and he diligently tapped the titles into his Goodreads search bar. 

(She  _ loved _ the internet...didn’t see at all why people her age and older were expected to shun it).

Fall had faded into winter, and winter into spring, by the time she dared linger on his doorstep. She hadn’t eaten in some days, and was hungry, needed to feed, but she still lingered...and he turned around. 

“Do you want to come in?” he asked, and she did, so much. 

She thought of Dracula’s  _ “I don’t drink...wine” _ as she accepted a glass from him, tentatively putting her arm around him as they sank into his soft couch while they watched a movie. To her surprise, he snuggled into her touch with ease, clearly not minding the chill of her skin. 

So she was less surprised by the end of the movie when he kissed her, touching her face as he did like she was beautiful and precious. Her initial lack of response made him pull away, looking embarrassed.

“Sorry -- if you don’t want to then we don’t have to --”

Barbara forgot her fears in that moment and kissed him in response, pulling him close, feeling his heart thunder against her, her desire to eat completely forgotten in her desire for something else entirely, a totally different kind of ravenous hunger. She unbuttoned her black blouse and hiked up her skirt and pulled his clothes away, and his bed was rickety, and it was a little messy and awkward at first, but she was able to hold and caress him for so long as they satiated their hunger, his kisses were soft and full of affection and she reveled in them, reveled in his warm skin against hers, and so it _all_ seemed entirely lovely to her. 

She left before the sun came up, but she left a note on his nightstand telling him to meet her again the next night, and it wasn’t until she returned to her own home that she realized the magnitude of the mistake she’d made. 

Especially since the next night, before she had a chance to see him, she recognized a different person’s scent upon the wind. A sickly sweet scent that had been seared into her brain over thirty years prior. 

She rounded the corner and saw him. Thin to the point of skeletal, skin as white as bone, hair as green as acid, lips dripping blood as he pressed a young girl to the alley wall and drained her, dark red dripping down her shirt to puddle on the dirty concrete. The girl was already dead, and the vampire turned and looked, seeing Barbara and grinning maniacally. Licking his reddened lips. 

Though he was decades older than her, he had clearly not lived  _ quite _ long enough to forget the face of one of his victims.

“Didn’t I kill you?” he inquired. “Clearly not well enough, it seems.”

She snarled, no pretenses made. Her eyes flashing redder than her hair, nails extending into claws, upper canines extending into long fangs. No one could mistake what she was, upon seeing her. 

“Finally…” she growled. “ _I_ can finally kill _you_.”

“Ooh, you can try, darling! Many have.”

They tore at each other like rabid alley cats, him screeching with laughter at her rage, at her angry screams. Every time the poor dead girl entered her line of sight, her vision sharpened, and her claws dug in a little deeper. 

She had him pinned to the ground, lifting her hand to pierce his heart with her claws, fangs still bared in a snarl, when she heard a differently familiar voice. 

“Barbara?”

When she looked up, when she saw him, he was still in his blue scrubs from the hospital. He stared, eyes huge, breath coming too quickly. The look on his face of shock, of realizing all at once who she was,  _ what _ she was, and of horror. 

Even though her heart no longer worked, it still managed to break. 

The vampire broke her grip, knocking her over and getting to his feet. Stepping on her back, grinding her face into the concrete. She choked back tears. 

“Friend of yours?” The sickeningly sweet smell, the gleeful voice, both scoured her senses. “Didn’t know what you are, hm? That you and I are the monsters he was told about as a little boy? Maybe he doesn’t believe it. Maybe I should prove it.”

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you  _ dare _ touch him,” she managed to say against the pavement. “If you kill him, I swear I’ll --”

“Oh,  _ I’m _ not going to kill him.” He got off her back and moved over; Dick backed up rapidly, but not rapidly enough, for the vampire grabbed him by the front of his scrubs. “ _ You _ are.”

The claw opened up only a thin, shallow cut on the side of Dick’s neck, but the smell of blood released into the air was overpowering. Though  _ he _ had just fed, her sire clearly must’ve guessed her hunger, how hard it would be to control it, and so she gasped, which only intensified the smell, gulping air as the edge of need in her stomach sharpened. 

She had had a small cut on her own neck the night he had attacked her.

Barbara got to her feet, taking a shuddering breath. Her sire pushed Dick forward, so that he fell into her arms. The blood trickled down the side of his neck, and he looked up at her, his eyes still wide. She understood, she understood the idea of him being terrified of her, of him being repulsed by her; her fangs and claws were still extended, her irises flickering red, breathing in the smell of his blood, she must’ve looked every inch like a monster. 

But Dick Grayson surprised her yet again. He didn’t try to escape, but cupped her face in his hands. And, while her sire howled with laughter at the gesture, he whispered, too quietly to be heard, to her: 

“I don’t think you’ll do it.”

Her clawed hands encircled his wrists, and their eyes met. 

Then she very gently let go of him, stepping away. The other vampire stopped laughing, his eyes growing huge with shock and outrage. 

“How…”

“I’m not like you,” she said to him, her voice completely level. He kept standing there, rooted to the spot. “And you don’t get to have a hold on this city _or_ on _me_. Not anymore.”

She moved quicker than she would’ve thought possible. The next second, before he could do a thing to either of them, her fangs closed around him and she tore out his throat. Like _he_ was just another of _her_ victims. Instead of the other way around. 

Blood ran down her mouth, down her chin, and dripped over her clothes as he fell at her feet, dead once again. She wiped her mouth, every drop from her skin, finding that she could still defy the intoxicating scent and the fiery ache in her gut and, with shaking hands, made sure not to drink any of it. It would be an insult to the girl he had killed. 

A hand rested on her shoulder and she turned, looking at Dick again. The way he moved was tentative, the way he looked at her like he was seeing her again in a new light. 

“You were right,” she whispered in return. “I would not hurt you. I  _ will _ not.”

He nodded, then tilted his head slightly to the side. 

“Okay. I...I’ll call the police anonymously, to come here, get this poor girl to her parents...call the morgue, get  _ him _ to the crematorium, later.” She didn’t even look at the other vampire’s body; she felt elated that he was gone, completely at peace. “Make sure he’s gone for good.” But a little sorrow eclipsed her peace. “And Dick, you can go back to your residency. I won’t mind. You don’t have to stay mixed up in me and my, well, problems.”

Her claws hadn’t receded when his other hand took hers. 

“You  _ are _ a different woman than I knew,” he admitted. Her chest tightened, and she prepared to say goodbye. “But...I was more right about you than wrong, I think.”

He kissed her forehead, then walked to the edge of the alleyway while she watched, stunned by him once again. 

“I’ll be at home. Whenever you wanna come. You and I are gonna have a  _ lot _ to talk about.”

He stepped out into the night. 

Barbara could have flown away, right then. She could have run. 

Instead, she squared her shoulders, placed a hand over her heart. Then, a strange peace coming over her once again, she left too, following him, soon catching up. So that the two of them walked on, side by side, into the soft, enveloping darkness of the Gotham City night. 


	7. Day 7: Goodnight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was good, as always, to do this with you guys. Here's to being here again next year.

Dick couldn’t help, as he kept running into her, that she seemed almost familiar. 

She was certainly captivating, but she had told him so little about herself, even though he frequently saw her around, particularly around his most regularly visited places in the city. He could recognize her on sight by now, the beautiful woman a few years older than him, with her long red hair and lively green eyes and thousands of freckles starring her skin, with her wire-rimmed glasses and omnipresent coffee cup and laptop bag. She tended to wear comfortable clothes, long skirts and sweaters and jeans and full-sleeved cotton shirts, but now that the weather was finally warming, she would shed her sweaters, and her broad shoulders and muscular arms, as much as her pretty eyes, took his breath away. 

He saw her in Robinson Park, where he liked to go for runs. Sitting next to the park benches in her wheelchair, engrossed in a book, hair tied in a ponytail or braid or messy half-bun while the wind blew strands of it around her face. He would lean against a tree, drinking his water, and she would glance up at him, tilting her head to the side and making him blush hard.

He saw her at his gym, meeting with a woman he assumed was her physical therapist, doing dozens of chin-ups and lifting weights that most of the men he knew would find impossible. Whichever of his friends was with him would nudge him and smirk, telling him to close his mouth or go take a cold shower. 

He saw her in his favorite bar, in his favorite indie coffee shop, in the Ethiopian restaurant across from his favorite bakery. She drank whiskey, she drank strong black coffee, she ordered food heavy with fiery red and orange spice, and that seemed right to him. 

He saw her in the library when he was taking his brothers and sister to find new reading material, working on her dissertation, piles of old texts around her while she tapped furiously at her laptop. His brothers all would say hi to her, but Cass in particular took a shine to her there, frequently marching up to where she was working and opening a book, pointing to a word and asking what it meant, how to spell it. And she would  _ always _ shut her laptop and talk to his sister about it. 

Only a few months, and his family was talking to her, and she felt as familiar as an old friend, which was definitely strange. 

His siblings concluded that the connection must be because she lived near where he worked, otherwise how could two people coincidentally run into each other so many times? Bruce, suspicious as always, had checked the police database for recent arrest records of redheaded women, to make sure she wasn’t a murderer or convicted stalker, and Alfred had berated him for it. 

Dick, for his part, kept wanting to see her. He had only spoken to her a handful of times, which was, to be fair, not nearly enough to convey much personal information, but every time he had been charmed by her passion, her dry humor, and her obvious intelligence. She talked about her dissertation using terms he didn’t understand, but the last thing he wanted to do was interrupt her, even to ask questions.

“It’s my second PhD,” she’d explained when he'd dared sit next to her in the coffee shop, his latte resting next to her black coffee. “The first one was in political studies, this one is in computer science. My thesis is that our preoccupation with technology is for the purpose of surveillance and allowing invasions of privacy for better ease, and how we can use it to better our lives without sacrificing our autonomy.”

“What are some of your ideas for that?”

Her eyes lit up, and it made his heart leap as she kept talking about what she loved. 

Later, she said: “Did you say you were training to be a social worker?” and it was his turn to light up. He told her about his own odd, cobbled-together family and his desire to help and protect kids like his family members had been. For a moment, he assumed she would think him insincere or overly cheesy, but she smiled around her coffee cup. 

“Sounds like me, my dad, and my stepmom,” she murmured. “You’re an unusual man, Dick.”

“Not as unusual as you,” he said, and when she flushed, he added hastily, “I don’t mean unusual in a bad way, I mean...well, you seem kind of extraordinary. Like no one I've ever met.”

Barbara ducked her head at that, her blush increasing. Dick wondered what he’d accidentally struck upon by saying that. 

He was still thinking about it on patrol that night. The days were less bitter now that spring was coming, but the nights still chilled him to his bones; he shivered in the face of the rain-heavy wind, huddling into the neck of his uniform. It was far, far too late at night, bordering on early morning. 

Recently, he and his family had been trying to track down an online predator, but the man in question had, up until then, done a far too good job of hiding his IP address. But that very morning, the predator’s name, address, and total list of crimes had been publicly posted on the company he worked at’s website, and when they’d gone to the GCPD, he was already in custody. All the man knew was that his computer screen had gone black, with a mysterious green symbol, a stylized mask in the shape of a woman’s face, emblazoned across it...and less than twenty minutes later, he’d been doxxed. 

That symbol had been turning up a lot over the last few months. Crime lords who’d had their accounts drained, politicians who’d had their illegal dealings leaked to the press, various other criminals who’d been exposed or blackmailed or threatened, all via their computers. Bruce was going frantic trying to find who it was, trying to decide if this person should be taken down or taken into the fold. 

What was more, like the woman he kept meeting, something about that symbol seemed to strike a chord in him. Like a long-forgotten memory, from another time. Another life. 

The best they could figure about the mysterious hacker was that they were operating from somewhere in Gotham, as they seemed to primarily target local cases -- for now, at least. More information was slow in coming. 

So Dick perched on his rooftop under the damp weather, watching the pink and green neon lights flicker beneath him. 

Until below him, he saw a flicker of movement. 

Leaving the lit glass doors of the police precinct, most of her partly hidden by the dripping black slope of her umbrella, the rain framing her like she was a portrait, some long-ago painted image of a queen. He ducked away, trying not to be creepy -- besides, _Nightwing_ had no reason to know her. 

But then he heard her shout. 

One of the uniformed cops had followed her from the precinct, angrily yelling and gesticulating about something; judging by the termination slip in his hand. The department hadn’t been able to take his gun; it was still in his hand.

Dick had seen enough cases in which a man had followed a woman into a dark, lonely space. In which the man had had a gun. 

Horrified, he leapt and swung down from the rooftop, running forward across the empty street to the sidewalk --

\-- and as soon as he did, caught the man cursing at her for  _ sending that to the Commissioner, I’m ruined now, do you know what you’ve done by revealing that _ and brandishing his gun --

\-- and before Dick could do anything, the heel of her hand drove up and against the underside of his diaphragm. He stopped in place and stared as she struck her would-be attacked across the face as he wheezed, as she knocked the gun out of his hand, punched him in the gut and slapped him down to the ground. Then rolled forward over his hand, making him shriek as his fingers crunched. 

“Getting fired is the least you deserve,” she hissed. “You should be  _ in prison _ . And you’re not as clever as you think you are; you were only able to find out it was me by listening in on my father.”

She rolled back; he scrambled to his feet. Dick felt his eyes grow wide, but not from shock or disapproval or nervousness. 

“And if you think that staying out of prison will protect you, it won’t. I will protect her. And if you  _ ever _ go near her again, I’ll find out  _ far _ more on you, I swear. Now  _ get out _ .”

He was gone, running away a whimpering, wailing mess. Only then did Barbara turn, and look up at Nightwing. 

It came to him at once.

“An expert in computers...finding things out on criminals, and…”

Her eyes met the white lenses of his mask.

“Exposing people. It’s you.” His voice was soft. “You’re the one.”

She drew back slightly. He took in her beauty again, breathless from her ease at fighting, the fire in her words, in the way she didn’t hesitate to protect herself or pledge her protection to someone who needed it. 

“It’s you too, isn’t it,” she replied. 

He started.

“Oh, come on. You sound exactly the same.” She smirked faintly. “At least  _ I _ use a voice modifier.”

“Fair enough. So you’re…”

As she said it, the word whispered in his mind. 

Oracle.

_ Oracle. _

Like a half-forgotten dream he couldn’t quite hold. A name he should have known. 

Then he saw her lips form his own name, form  _ Nightwing _ , and they locked eyes again. He slowly sheathed his escrima sticks, and she rolled closer. Neither of them caring for their secret identities they clearly both worked so hard to protect. 

“Do we know each other?” he wondered.

“I should hope so,” she breathed, “we’ve been dancing around each other for months now.”

“No, I just...you seem familiar. Like a friend.”

He thought of all her appearances in his life, how her eyes had lingered on him as much as his on her, and he knew somehow that she would eat chocolate with mint but not with fruit, that she drank her coffee black but put milk in her tea. That she liked cats and thought dogs were too clingy. That she had read Edith Hamilton religiously when she was a child, had been drawn to the goddesses, the heroines, the tragic story within the Iliad of the oracle Cassandra. 

She shook her head.

“I..I feel...your favorite animals are elephants, right, like the ones you grew up with. And you love musicals and comedies and you secretly watch reality TV at home alone. You only pretend to like cucumber sandwiches, and you wear bright colors because they remind you of your parents’ trapeze outfits. But I don’t remember you actually telling me any of that.”

Had they known each other before? 

For the name  _ Oracle _ really did ring true in his mind, taste sweet on his lips. 

“But that’s crazy,” she concluded. “I’ve only known you for a few months at the most. We’ve only talked to each other a dozen times.”

Underneath the drizzle of the rain and the shadow of the night, Dick tensed slightly; he didn’t think it was crazy, and he wanted to keep talking about it. To explore why they seemed to know each other, why they kept being drawn together. Didn’t it matter?

Maybe it didn’t.

Maybe what mattered was that here, now, they’d met each other. For whether he knew her or not, he had been right; she still seemed an extraordinary woman. 

“Then maybe you should confirm it,” he offered. “I...I’d love to keep talking with you. As heroes. As civilians. As both, if you want.”

Lifting her umbrella, Barbara considered him again. It took a while.

But eventually, even under the rain, that smile crossed her lips again. The smile that made him light up inside, enough to brighten the whole night. He suddenly thought that if they had known each other in another life, that smile had made him brighten there too. He was certain of it. 

“Let’s go with both. I’ve heard a  _ lot _ that intrigues me about that Bat-family of yours.”

“Oh, you’re in for it with that lot...but, really. It’s going to be good getting to know you. Like it was good to meet you, Barbara Gordon.”

She extended her hand, like they were meeting for the first time. He took the rough, strong palm and fingers in his own. 

“It was good to meet  _ you _ , Dick Grayson.”

The echoes of that other life where they had a history together, that other knowledge, did not thrill him quite as much as getting to know her all over again in this one. What mattered was that the touch of light was just about to begin to poke its way through the cover of Gotham’s sky, the few stars that were still just visible through the cloud cover, and the simple word she said before they left to be Oracle and Nightwing again:

_ “Goodnight.”  _

For it sounded not like a farewell, but like a  _ “see you soon.” _

It sounded like making _new_ memories. It sounded like a future.


End file.
